FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino appears on Fox News shortly after Director Kash Patel to outline his perspectives on the investigation into the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
Deputy Bongino also wants viewers to know the investigation has been emotionally challenging for him due to his friendship with Charlie Kirk. Thankfully, Bongino notes he expects to be okay as the investigation continues. WATCH:
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Many people were thrilled with the nomination and eventual confirmation of Kash Patel to be Director of the FBI. However, with decades of researching the political weaponization of the FBI and against the known capabilities of the nominee, we were not part of the thrilled group.
The non-pretenders looked at the challenge, contrast the scope of work against the skillset of the person selected to confront the institutional corruption, and warned people there was more reason to be apprehensive than optimistic.
Do you remember us outlining how the various FBI field offices would be keeping Patel/Bongino tied up with busy work, and stuff to go on TV about.
That said, we don’t want him to fail, but Director Patel has walked himself into a gauntlet of consequence that will be difficult to exit given his lack of discernment – evidenced in the events surrounding the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
The people in control of FBI field operations (not Kash), set up their agency head by informing the boss a suspect was in custody.
The ever focused on public opinion, Director Kash Patel, then took to Twitter at 6:21 pm on September 10th to relay the news. According to media reports Patel was just about to eat dinner at a swanky New York City restaurant when he sent the text message.
We all watched it unfold.
There are three background facets worth discussing in the Charlie Kirk assassination. To wit, a fulsome historic reference is likely worth creating, so we can all evaluate information with a similar baseline.
(1) The background of events in the lead to Charlie Kirk’s murder; (2) the post-shooting activity of the FBI; and (3) the reality of motive carried by the 22-year-old assassin, Tyler Robinson. All three of these issues are separate and distinct; however, some people are dangerously merging them together. This should be avoided.
To help avoid conflation that happens, it is worth addressing all three issues separately and comprehensively. In this outline we address the first, the background events swirling around TPUSA and Kirk prior to the shooting.
Turning Point USA (TPUSA) is a donor funded organization. Within the business of engaging causes of worth it takes money, often a lot of money, to run the core logistics of the operation. With Charlie Kirk removed from TPUSA’s mission, I hope their donors and supporters remain fully engaged and are able to expand on his life’s work.
Back in 2022, the same background financial interests who were structuring the presidential run of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis also supported TPUSA.
Part of that collaboration surfaced in mid-August ’22, when DeSantis exited his five-days of silence in the aftermath of the FBI raid on President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate (August 8, 2022).
In the lead to the election campaign, DeSantis came out of his bunker directly into a promotional tour for his book, The Courage to be Free.
The Florida governor joined TPUSA as several events to increase his national profile. As a natural outcome TPUSA was funded for a short time by the same people funding the DeSantis long-term launch. Many of these donors were already part of the TPUSA financial system; it was a natural convergence.
To his credit, Charlie Kirk viewed the DeSantis effort as supporting a solid conservative, a fellow in the bigger battle, and yet remained supportive of Donald Trump throughout the collaboration and into the presidential primary once DeSantis formally announced over a year later.
Recently, when discussing the tragic event of Kirk’s assassination, Tucker Carlson noted Charlie Kirk took a lot of donor backlash for a shift in his position around the issue of Israel and the overwhelming retaliation taking place in Gaza.
Both groups, professional evangelicals and strong Israel supporters, took exception to Kirk questioning the attack on Iran and the ongoing decisions by the Israeli government to continue bombardment of Gaza. WATCH:
For almost two years, there has been a background conversation with a handful of people watching the Silicon Valley network closely and monitoring every move and position they take. They hold an entirely divergent set of motives that are not aligned with Making America Great Again behind this crew.
Everything that preceded the 2020 federal election was a complex system of control by a network of ideologues, federal agencies, allies in the private sector, financial stakeholders and corrupt interests all working toward a common goal.
There’s no need to go through the background of how the election was manipulated and how the government and private sector, specifically social media, worked to influence the 2020 outcome because you have all seen it.
Whether it was local election officials working to control outcomes, federal agencies working to support them (CISA, FBI, DHS), financial interests working to fund them (Zuckerberg et al), or social media platforms controlling the visible content and discussion (Twitter Files, Google, Facebook etc.), the objective was all the same. It was a massive one-sided operation against the free will of the American voter.
In the aftermath of the 2020 election, those same system operators, govt officials, corporate media, private sector groups and social media platforms then circled the wagons to scatter the evidence of their conduct. If you questioned anything, you were a threat. That’s the context to the dynamic that unfolded.
Lawfare operatives joined forces with Democrat staffers, and allies in social media platforms all worked in concert to target the voices of anyone who would rise in opposition to the corruption that was stunningly clear in the outcome of the election process. Corporate media then labeled, isolated, ridiculed and marginalized anyone who dared to point out the obvious.
When AG Merrick Garland says this of January 6, 2021: […] “the Justice Department has conducted one of the largest, most complex, and most resource-intensive investigations in our history. We have worked to analyze massive amounts of physical and digital data. We have recovered devices, decrypted electronic messages, triangulated phones, and pored through tens of thousands of hours of video. We have also benefited from tens of thousands of tips we received from the public. Following these digital and physical footprints, we were able to identify hundreds of people.” {link} The targeting operation needs context.
Do you remember on April 27, 2024, when DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz said, “more than 3.4 million search queries into the NSA database took place between Dec. 1st, 2020 and Nov. 30th, 2021, by government officials and/or contractors working on behalf of the federal government.” The result was “more than 1 million searches of private documents and communication of Americans that were illegal and non-compliant,” and over “10,000 federal employees have access to that database.” {OIG Testimony}.
Put the statement from Garland together with the statement from Horowitz, and you get an understanding of what was done.
Hundreds of stakeholders in the Lawfare network joined forces with hundreds of people who became staff researchers for a weaponized Congress. Hundreds more social media background agents then poured thousands of hours into feeding private information to the DOJ, FBI, J6 Committee and all of their hired staff working on the project.
How do I know?…
There’s a reason why the J6 Committee deleted the records of their activity, an angle missed by most. When you understand what they hid and why they did it, you then understand why current Speaker of The House Mike Johnson will not go near the subject.
The J6 Committee used interfaces with the NSA database and pre-existing portals with aligned DHS Social Media databases (including Twitter, see prior “Twitter Files”), as research and evidence gathering mechanisms for their investigations.
🚨 BREAKING: Special Counsel Ed Martin has dropped a bombshell, announcing a full-scale investigation into the actions of the January 6th Committee for the deliberate destruction and tampering of evidence and the issuance of illegitimate pardons signed by an autopen. pic.twitter.com/qPWEJwb2UF
— TRUMP ARMY (@TRUMP_ARMY_) September 8, 2025
The J6 targets were identified through a collaboration between the legislative research group and the FBI. [That’s unlawful by the way – but that’s another matter]. The FBI contracted Palantir to identify the targets using facial recognition software and private sector databases.
Once identified, the targets were then searched in the NSA database for a fulsome context of identity. All subsequent electronic metadata of the targets was retrieved and utilized in prosecution; however, no one ever discovered this was the collaborative method. That has not come out yet.
Ultimately, the J6 Committee hiding and deleting their files and operational techniques was due to several issues. They really didn’t have a choice given the unknowns of an incoming republican majority.
SSCI Vice Chairman Mark Warner is not happy the Trump administration is subverting the oversight authorities of the SSCI and Gang-of-Eight. If you know the background of the SSCI and Warner, his frustration is a positive indication.
I’ll have much more to say about the ramifications of his anxiety and the background therein, but here’s the raw interview as broadcast for context of what will follow.
Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman, Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, told “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” that the committee was not briefed ahead of President Trump’s deadly Venezuelan boat strike that was allegedly carrying drugs. The mission was a military operation, but Warner said, “This kind of action should be briefed to the intelligence community.” WATCH:
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President Trump delivers remarks during a congressional dinner at the newly refurbished White House rose garden.
Senator James Lankford delivered the prayer, and President Trump gave remarks thanking the audience for their efforts to support MAGA policies and the legislative agenda of the administration. WATCH:
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Something odd is going on with this. Catherine Herridge reports that she “exclusively” gained a copy of the FBI files on Michael Flynn from FBI Director Kash Patel [SEE HERE]. Herridge uploaded the documents while she began reporting on them via Twitter [SEE HERE] then, mysteriously deleted her upload [SEE HERE].
Fortunately, I kept the tab open, because there are two pages that really caught my eye. The pages are labeled the “Flynn Timeline” and were created by someone in the FBI. Check these pages closely, and you can find things quite remarkable.
First, I have always suspected the greatest likelihood of who leaked the transcript of then National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s December ’16 phone call with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Kislyak to David Ignatius at the Washington Post was Mary McCord. Well, check out January 6, 2017:
01/06/17: “McCabe provides McCord [REDACTED]” Likely, almost certainly, the thing being discussed with DNI Clapper on 01/03/17. That would be the “Flynn Cuts,” which is the transcript of the phone call between Flynn and Kislyak.
The next entry is:
01/13/07: “Ignatius editorial” – Washington Post, David Ignatius – the reporter who received the leak of the Flynn transcript. A massive national security breach. The leaking of TSCI classified information, the Flynn transcript.
McCabe gives the transcript to McCord. Suddenly, Ignatius writes about the transcript. The Washington Post’s David Ignatius was the first to report on the Flynn/Kislyak call on January 12, 2017.
Stuff about Clapper calling Comey then going to the FBI I previously wrote about. Obama asked Clapper who was leaking all this stuff to the media. 01/03/17 Clapper calls Comey and asks him about the Flynn call. “Director describes” transcript to Clapper. 01/03/17, Clapper goes to FBI to retrieve transcript, which he then takes back to Obama.
Lt General William Joseph “Joe” Hartman is a University of Southern Alabama graduate (class of ’89). Hartman had served as the deputy commander of U.S. Cyber Command, and previously served as commander of the Cyber National Mission Force. Before that, he served in various infantry, intelligence and cyber operations military roles in the U.S., Germany, South Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan and other locations.
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump is expected to nominate Lt. Gen. William Hartman, the acting leader of both the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command, to formally lead both agencies, two people with knowledge of the situation told POLITICO on Thursday.
Hartman has the support of top officials at the White House, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Defense Department, according to one of the people. Both individuals were granted anonymity as they were not authorized to speak publicly.